Experience social technology the corporate way.

Written on Sunday, 29 September 2013 by Chris Vo

I thought I should do an extra blog post as requested by a user on my LinkedIn account about why we should use social monitoring tools. Here it is :)

So these are 7 reasons why you should consider social monitoring tools from a corporate perspective.

• Tailor your approach - It enables us to be aware of our next strategy or simply what we should post next on social media
• Measuring market effectiveness - We can see what the trends or conversations that our favourite brands or products are producing.
• Manage crisis pro-actively - We are able to identify negative criticism and attend to them promptly
• Public relations – ships! - This encourages connections with the community
• Benchmark your competition – Customers can compare products and services and recommend to friends through WoM (word of mouth) advertising. Monitoring competitors is crucial to know where you stand.
• Identify new market opportunities – Identifies new audiences, messages, ambassadors and more
• Insights in the most cost effective manner – Less time and less cost than traditional market surveys. Also in real time.

Written on Saturday, 21 September 2013 by Chris Vo

I have covered in earlier blogs the benefits of implementing social media technologies from a wide range of organizations. This week we gauge on GoPro's social media performance using the social monitoring tool, RowFeeder.

GoPro

You might have heard of the extensive and highly versatile camera manufacturing company, GoPro. GoPro is a brand of high-definition personal cameras, often used in extreme action video photography. They are known for being lightweight, rugged, wearable (head-mounted) or mountable in unusual places such as outside planes, cars, or boats.

I've chosen GoPro as my rat for this social monitoring tool experiment. GoPro has a high involvement in social media and popular range of products, I thought it would be the perfect company to monitor socially. So let's see how well they performed according to RowFeeder.

Row Feeder

RowFeeder works well with tracking posts and tweets on Facebook and Twitter. What makes
RowFeeder different from their competitors is that it provides users with the raw data you need in flexible, familiar excel reports. Simply input your term that you would like to track and raw data is delivered in a spreadsheet. The service will then use the Google search database to track down all trends, tags, conversations and mentions of the term on Twitter and Facebook for up to about 20,000 hits. This process can take a long time depending search term.

There were some pro's and cons' that I found while I was socially stalking GoPro. These apply to both the free and paid versions of RowFeeder (I have tested each account type).

Pro’s

There are a wide range of report types you could generate. I was able to save a report into excel format from one of 7 report types below:

Volume and Time Analysis -- See when people are talking and measure the size and velocity of the conversation.

Conversation Driver Analysis -- See what people are talking about. Search the underlying themes within the conversation.

Location Analysis -- See where the conversation is happening by country, state, and city relative to population.

People Analysis -- See who is driving the conversation. Draw out the most influential and active users.

Cons

Absolute sluggish process.Waiting for Rowfeeder to find GoPro hits on Facebook and Twitter database took nearly 20 mins just to find only 49 matches. RowFeeder needs to cycle through a range of non-relevant posts each time if you’re on the free account. This was a huge let-down.

After inputting my search terms then selecting which social services I wanted to retrieve data from, I noticed how unreliable the data will be due to only analysing Facebook and Twitter social networks. In saying this, blog posts and YouTube videos aren't included within the search pool.

Another con I found was when selecting the time of relevance manually, this was missing from the service completely.

Insights

As you can see in the pie graph of Twitter’s post mix only 54% out of 94 posts found were relevant to GoPro, the other 56% weren't.

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From these results shown above, you can see the mix and frequencies of the top related keywords & frequency of posts to be able to see which social media site has a stronger impact based on the term.

Overall, if GoPro became more socially active over their Twitter and Facebook networks it is possible to see higher figures in all areas of frequency and popularity of the search term.

We can expect to see improvements once GoPro releases a new camera and through mainstream social media for marketing.

You can check out the details of GoPro’s social monitoring results I found with RowFeeder here.

Written on Monday, 16 September 2013 by Chris Vo

Nowadays businesses associated with the professional services sector have switched to social technology platforms to maintain competitiveness within their selective industries. Last week, we discovered how the non-profit organization from the social sector, ONE meets their goals and objectives through social technology, receiving the benefits of using social media that followed. Today we probe into how the professionals benefit from implementing social technologies.

Cognizant, professionals in IT solutions and consulting

Founded in 1994, Cognizant is a world-class IT firm leading in today's business and technology services to help clients shift towards an advanced IT infrastructure future for; maintaining ahead of other competitors. Cognizant 2.0 (C2) is a service provided by the company to share knowledge and efficiently manage projects across the globe to delivery their clients the most cost-effective and comprehensive, end-to-end, advanced IT solutions. Through this service, Cognizant outsource specialized skills from a broad talent pool from across the globe to solve any problem through C2. Cognizant's new social media tool helps company continue growth, compete with outsourcing giants such as Accenture, IBM. C2 can be considered a social platform but for enterprise use.

You can see their service, C2 in action below.

Cognizant on current social media technologies

Their comprehensive applications of a variety of social media technologies include Twitter, Google+, Facebook and YouTube. Let’s look at how each social technology leverages value within Cognizant’s business functions based on the Mckinsey report.

Marketing and sales

Cognizant uses twitter to market the value of the services they provide by posting quality success stories of organizations implementing Cognizant solutions. This influences potential clients into considering using Cognizant based off positive feedback from other clients and assures that clients will achieve their IT innovation goals with Cognizant. You’ll also notice their use of Facebook include Business-2-business (B2B) communications and interactions.

Customer service

Like other organizations that adopts social technology, Cognizant provides customer care through twitter as a way of addressing their clients for technical issues or complaints about their service.

Enterprise-wide levers (Collaboration and communication)

Cognizant collaborates and communicates through the use of their own unique social technology platform, C2, to improve collaboration and communication between staff within their organization or when improving their client's current processes. This allows employees at Cognizant to be able to match talents to a specific task.

These social media technologies together effectively contributes to value across the organization at Cognizant and for their clients.

Written on Saturday, 7 September 2013 by Chris Vo

Rewinding back a couple of weeks when I briefly discussed how Commbank implements a social technology strategy to reap the benefits and values of providing a strong community and customer-based support network, today I will go through how an organization from the social sector (i.e. a not-for-profit institutions and non-governmental organization), could benefit from using social technology. Again, we’ll base how the social sectors can create values and benefits from the McKinsey report.

ONE is a not-for-profit organization with a mission to advocate and campaign to tackle the extremities of poverty and preventable diseases affecting third world countries such as Africa. They achieve their objectives by raising public awareness, as well as informing world political leaders on the need to support policies and programs to save lives and ultimately put kids back in schools for a better future. Co-founded by Bono, the lead singer of U2 in 2004, ONE is highly active with African activists and policy makers.

Execute mission

You may have of already noticed many organizations use Facebook or Twitter to help spread a message quickly but ONE shares with their supporters and readers compelling stories or facts about to encourage movement to help fight ONE’s cause. Some of them I found were informative and some quite funny.

ONE's online-presence on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Youtube has helped them reach a massive 3 million supporters! Through these social technology channels, ONE promotes public awareness and encourages movement by their supporters to help reduce the severity of poverty as well as commitment towards preventing diseases (such as #AIDS #TB & #malaria) from occurring in Africa.

So with the power of ONE organization to empower over three million supporters to take action, has proven that ONE has made a valuable use of social technologies to spread the word of their cause.

Here's a random fact..

On September 24 of this month, an organisation which ONE associates with, The Global Fund will launch a mass social media campaign push to end the AIDS, TB and malaria diseases for good during a World leaders meeting at the UN General Assembly (UNGA). What will take place is a message which will be released to all supporters' social media page simultaneously with the following: